The World According to Amaranth: Interspecies Memory in Tehuacán Valley

u 7 The World According to Amaranth: Interspecies Memory in Tehuacán Valley Kata Beilin Indians had come to recognize that their fate and the fate of amaranth was one and the same. —John N. Cole, Amaranth: From the Past for the Future Tehuacán Valley lies between the neovolcanic mountain ranges that divide it from Oaxaca to the south and Veracruz to the east. The mountains stop the clouds coming from the oceans and, as a result, Tehuacán Valley is very dry. The clouds only manage to rise high enough to get through to the valley when hurricanes hit from the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific Ocean. Then it rains. Sev- eral of the volcanos are active and provoke little earthquakes, especially in the summer. There is a great variety of cacti on the horizon in the south, and beyond the mountain range in the east. In the west, the mountains are closer, and the slopes climbing up to the Pico de Orizaba are covered with snow all year round. Some people know that Tehuacán Valley is the place of origin of maize, where the oldest maize samples were found by Richard MacNeish. Very few know, however, that along with maize, this was also a place from which a biocultural empire of amaranth extended that was decisive for the prosperity and health of pre-Hispanic communities. Amaranth’s biological qualities and indigenous peoples’ cultural and political arrangements were so closely interrelated that, as it turned out later, they could not prosper without each other. After the conquest, amaranth disappeared from this place for many centuries only to re- turn relatively recently. Maize and amaranth are now two of the main crops in Tehuacán Valley, but when it does not rain, maize withers and amaranth sur- vives. Environmental Cultural Studies Through Time: The Luso-Hispanic World Hispanic Issues On Line 24 (2019) BEILIN u 145 Amaranth, like quinoa, is a very high-maintenance plant. It demands a slower rhythm of life adjusted to its needs and, in crucial moments of plant- ing, replanting, and harvesting, a great deal of direct attention. Even if it can survive for a month without water, it is sensitive to various pests, and it withers without light. Amaranth prefers a minifundio rather than latifundio because it requires human handling at various moments: for example, it does best when harvested by hand. It likes to be touched. Indigenous people like to work with amaranth. The human population of Tehuacán Valley includes mixed-race Mexicans, those who José Vasconcelos called almost one hundred years ago “a cosmic race,” along with relatively homogenous indigenous vil- lages of Mixteca, Popolocas—whom Aztecs (or Nahuas) used to (and still) consider inferior—and Nahuas themselves.1 Popolocas are the poorest ethnic group in the dry region of La Mixteca surrounding the town of Tehuacán (see Figures 1 and 2). Figure 1. Drought at the Valley of Tehuacán (La Mixteca Region). Photograph by Kata Beilin HIOL u Hispanic Issues On Line 24 u Fall 2019 146 u THE WORLD ACCORDING TO AMARANTH Figure 2. La Mixteca – Map. Grupo Cooperativo Quali. In the1980s, Raúl Hernández Garciadiego and Gisela Herrerías arrived in Te- huacán Valley in order to think of poverty remediation strategies. In a lengthy conversation with me in his office in Tehuacán, Raúl, a philosopher who wrote his dissertation in dialogue with the “difference principle” of John Rawls’s theory of justice, insisted that even if a certain level of inequality may be un- avoidable, justice can only be achieved by a systematic effort to decrease it. By becoming an activist rather than academic, he rebelled against philosophy as representing the interests of the class in power, and let himself be led by his dreams of a more equal society. Gisela, his wife, has developed similar ideals while pursuing her doctorate in education. But in La Mixteca, their belief that poverty could be remedied encountered dry earth. Soon they realized that suffering in Tehuacán Valley was not due to the lack of money as much as it was to the lack of water. The area’s geological formation does not allow for the drilling of wells, and the people could not cover the cost of deep drilling and pumping. Very little can be harvested from dry-farming due to scarce and irregular rains during the four-month rainy season. The couple knew that helping others is a dangerous enterprise that can result in the imposition of one’s own visions and needs, thereby worsening rather than improving the lives of those one is trying to help. In order to really help, one should begin by understanding and this understanding must be as little subjective as possible. HIOL u Hispanic Issues On Line 24 u Fall 2019 BEILIN u 147 In order to achieve this goal, Raúl and Gisela used the method they learned in workshops led by José Luis Brito, who advocated a form of participative ob- servation that required participant-observers to write notes in the exact words of the people with whom they interacted in an effort to exclude their own impressions. According to Brito, this practice decreased the possibility of pro- jecting one’s own ideals onto interviewed subjects. Researchers had to respect the time of the communities they wanted to understand, which was often ruled by different rhythms and cycles. Years passed, and Gisela and Raúl did not achieve anything until, one day, amaranth helped them to move forward. Someone mentioned amaranth to Gisela and Raúl as a very nutritious grain that does well in the drought conditions and that used to be an essential crop centuries ago. In the midst of doubts, determined to move forward somehow, they decided to try. In 1982, Eduardo Espitia, a seed collector, gave them seeds of Amaranthus hypochondriacus, Amaranthus caudatus, and Amaran- thus cruentus so that they could see which one would grow best. Not surpris- ingly, Amaranthus hypochondriacus, the variety that had grown in Mexico in precolonial times, outgrew its competitors and thus opened the way to the fields of Tehuacán Valley again. Planted in a small parcel in a Popoloca village, the amaranth grew fast. After six weeks, it was forty centimeters tall, green and beautiful. But the next time that Raúl went to see it, it was no longer there. Not a single leaf was left. It had all disappeared, leaving no trace, as if it had never been planted. Perplexed, Raúl knocked on the door of the closest Popoloca house to ask the people living there if they knew what happened to the field that they had planted and that was now shining black soil. “Se enquelitó,” was the answer, “y lo desenquelitamos.” Aztecs used to classify plants into zacates, those which were inedible, and quelites, the name given to all wild plants that could be eaten. What local people told Raúl was that they noticed the field suddenly covered with yummy greens and ate them. Raúl returned home depressed, but Gisela told him that this was their first success, that in this way “amaranth told them” (this was the way she put it) that it would grow well in the valley and the Popoloca people told them that they would eat it because, somehow, they remembered it. It is hard to tell how amaranth reminded Popoloca people that it was edible. It could have been similar to some other quelites that they ate.2 Or, maybe, it was the smell exhaled by the leaves after one of those extremely rare rains that attracted the humans, awakening in them the biocultural memory (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols) from centuries past, memories passed through genes and interactions from the ancestors who often ate green leaves of amaranth in a stew. In the beautiful chapter on “The Language of the Trees,” Peter Wohlleben argues that trees and other plants communicate with other species through scent.3 The bottom line is that indigenous people in HIOL u Hispanic Issues On Line 24 u Fall 2019 148 u THE WORLD ACCORDING TO AMARANTH the Tehuacán Valley liked to grow and eat amaranth and they accepted white activists from the outside as amaranth’s allies. Figure 3. Ripe Amaranth. Grupo Cooperative Quali. Figure 4. Maturing Amaranth. Photograph by Felix Beilin. According to Toledo and Barrera-Bassols, biocultural memory is a knowledge of the environment with its multiple forms of life relevant to human survival that allows us to continue inhabiting the planet. The concept involves human HIOL u Hispanic Issues On Line 24 u Fall 2019 BEILIN u 149 subjective perception of the environment as a space of life where we estab- lish relationships with different creatures that help us satisfy our needs. In this essay, I stretch this concept to see memory as an inter- and intra-active hybrid material and semiotic process occurring between humans and certain elements of the nonhuman environment.4 According to Karen Barad, nothing exits except through intra-action with others, and all agency is distributed. I argue that this is also true for environmental memories, which are not just human subjective phenomena, but rather intra-active phenomena. For that reason, I call them interspecies memories. I work through the history of human relations with amaranth attempt- ing to see it also as a history of amaranth’s relations with humans. For this purpose, I connect the concept of biocultural memory with Eduardo Kohn’s concept of “living thoughts” (78). In his multispecies ethnography of the Am- azon forest, Kohn coined the concept of “living thoughts” to describe live or- ganisms reacting to each other, not only within the life span of an individual, but also in the deep time of evolution where the shape of an anteater’s mouth transforms to fit the corridors of the anthill.

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